Your local alt-weekly: Putting the “sex” back in sexism

Let me be the first to admit: Media stories about other folks in the media tend to be self-aggrandizing, self-referential, and just plain self-absorbed. This isn’t to say that I don’t think there are important media stories to be had out there. The corporatization of media makes it more important than ever that the public is made aware of how stories are gathered, created, and reported.

But the insularity of the media business also often creates journalist-as-local-celeb stories that are less actual news pieces than they are colleague knockdowns or knightings. No matter how you slice it (and as much as they hate to admit it), journos will always be way less important than the stories they cover. And that’s a good thing.

That caveat in mind, David Brauer’s MinnPost piece on Thursday, “What if City Pages Doesn’t Suck?” held a suspicious and simpleminded response from CP editor Kevin Hoffman that was so dubious it deserves a serious second look.

When asked about the continuing and ever-obvious gender disparities at CP, Hoffman responded that A-list editor Jessica Armbruster and copy editor Bridgette Reinsmoen are veteran female employees with responsibility. As a former CP staff writer, I had the pleasure of working with both Armbruster and Reinsmoen, and both are fantastic, especially Reinsmoen, who often put in more hours there than anyone else, poring over pages with a fine-toothed comb and a grimy, old style guide.

However, Reinsmoen and Armbruster hardly have the authority to say what feature stories the paper covers. That’s left up to the almost-all-male news staff, which, minus Paul Demko (who is now here at Minnesota Monitor) now consists of five males and one female. Up until a few months ago, with the hiring of staff writer Beth Walton, the paper’s news-feature writers consisted of six men and zero women. A male-only news regime was in place at CP for more than a year.

Continued: Click “Read more”Worst of all, Hoffman’s comment, a poor attempt at inoculating the gender-gap criticism, was mostly glossed over in Brauer’s piece in favor of detailing CPs’ traffic-producing blog posts, quick hits and slide shows about things like naked sushi and Ms. Pac Man in Hustler — dude-centric topics that have become a standard at City Pages under VVM’s thumb. Hits, it would seem, have outpaced quality as a defining measurement of success.

Compounding the palpable sexism in CP’s print pages, Hoffman is known to staffers as a “frat boy” around the office. While that’s an admittedly small-minded and overly simplistic stereotype, some former (and current) staffers describe Hoffman as a single-minded editor hungry for dude-centricity: There’s a not-so-subtle push to bring in city-gritty, dirty-underbelly, sexed-up stories that can be neatly packaged for web hits. (Web hits are the fool’s gold of the Internet. SEX. The Maxim-ization of the media helped create the current Fark-ization of the media, which has served to turn stories into flimsy currency traded for hits. SEX. But that’s a whole other story that reveals another layer of dumbing down altogether.)

Former staffers I’ve talked to say there was an uncomfortable and juvenile, slap-on-the-back atmosphere created by the heavily male masthead. Hoffman allegedly told one staffer that, since the A-list was being edited by females, it was necessary to make sure it wasn’t too, you know, girly. Testosterone-driven stories are acceptable, apparently, but anything with too much estrogen doesn’t pass the CP sniff test.

City Pages isn’t the only Village Voice Media paper to have a mostly-male masthead. In fact, of the 16 VVM papers, there are only five female editors, although one of those is Patricia Calhoun, who co-founded Denver’s Westword paper before VVM snatched it up.

Even more egregious? Of the papers’ 33 managing, senior, associate editors and senior writers, only 9 are female. In other words, females make up only about 25 percent of all of VVM’s editorial-decision makers. And males consistently outnumber females in the newsroom at all but one (LA Weekly) of VVM’s 16 news newspapers. All hirings go through the corporate offices in Phoenix.

To be sure, CP has done some intriguing stories in the last year, such as the one Brauer noted about the shrinking sex-crimes unit at the MPD. And those great stories don’t deserve to get lost among the big-muscled and even bigger-boobed cover packages. But excusing the current macho ideology of VVM content based on a handful of well-reported pieces is like reasoning Bravo doesn’t suck because it also occasionally airs a provocative documentary in between endless hours of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” 

So when we’re talking about whether a newspaper “sucks,” perhaps it’s best not to judge a paper’s weight in fool’s gold (web hits), but whether a weekly paper whose mission is to be a “bastion of progressive thought” actually achieves said mission, versus continuing to breed and feed chauvinism and prejudice through its hit-hungry story coverage and regressive hiring practices.

Related: Charming: City Pages music editor learned of impending dismissal on the street